Battery recycling grants go toward research, collection

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has announced 17 recipients for a combined $62 million in funding for efforts designed to increase battery recycling rates in the U.S.

The funding, which is tied to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, aims to increase consumer participation in consumer electronics battery recycling and improve the economics of battery recycling.

“Recycling used batteries reduces demand for new materials and allows our domestic industry to produce at lower costs,” the DOE says.

“Capturing the full battery supply chain—from sourcing critical materials to manufacturing to recycling—puts the U.S. in the driver’s seat as we build our clean energy economy,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm adds.

The list of 17 projects, published on the DOE website, includes some involving existing recycling companies and others proposed by national laboratories and university researchers.

California-based ERI is listed as project lead in one effort that has received $4.8 million in DOE funding. “Expanding Consumer Participation in Consumer Electronics” is listed as the title of the project, which also involves a national laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

The objectives of the ERI project include developing a web-based educational platform that will provide regional guidance for both consumers and collectors on the importance of recycling electronics, guidance on data security, proper packaging safety, regulatory labeling, reporting and finding local sites to recycle electronics.

Colorado-based recycling technology vendor Amp (formerly Amp Robotics) is the lead in a project titled “Demonstrating the technoeconomic viability of automated characterization and sorting of batteries within E-waste,” which has received $6.4 million in DOE funding.

“Amp Robotics seeks to establish a sorting process with at least 25 percent efficiencies over the state of the art, if not substantially more, which will drive expanded profitable consumer battery collection and conversion in the U.S. through artificial Intelligence and automated sorting techniques,” the company says of its effort.

North Carolina-based Li Industries Inc. has received $7 million to develop an automated, integrated sorting and preprocessing solution that will be faster and more cost-effective for recycling end‐of‐life consumer electronics batteries. "This project aims to reduce transport costs by consolidating all sorting and pre‐processing steps in one facility," the DOE says.

Other entities that have received battery recycling-related funding include the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Merced County Regional Waste Management Authority in California.

The single largest grant, valued at $8 million, went to San Diego-based ExPost Technology Inc. to develop an advanced mobile machinery system for preprocessing consumer electronics and batteries. The company will try to develop an innovative system that would integrate zero-emission shredding and extraction techniques to eliminate electrochemical and chemical hazards from batteries, mitigating the risks of fire and chemical incidents during transportation.